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Friday, June 20, 2014

The joy of Horace

Horace Silver pictured in 1989 by Dimitri Savitski (Wikipedia)

Since back in 2007 when bassist Christian McBride made a passing comment on Horace Silver's Alzheimer, his passing yesterday was not unexpected news (so much so, that a rumour became news and spread like fire earlier in the year).

There are very fine obits around (like this one) about Silver's wonderful life, so we'll skip that.

His legacy, what remains after the man's gone, is phenomenal. As a piano player, his style was very rhythmic (watch out for that left hand, which can also be heard in contemporaries such as John Williams and Eddie Costa) and somewhat sketchy, as if he was dotting down ideas for new compositions as he was playing them. A prolific composer and a tasking leader, his music was lively, bluesy, gutsy, churchy, with feeling.

I only saw Silver once, in 1996, and while I was looking for some music from that decade, I came across the video below. You'll probably find Red Holloway's solo on tenor overwhelming, but if you can stop dancing and listen carefully, you'll notice that this composition is very simple. The gist of it is just two chords through several bars, and the rhythm is as simple as anything you can imagine in the tradition that goes from gospel to early rock'n'roll. This is from a live performance in 1994, and still Silver deemed necessary, unavoidable, to have Carl Burnett drum like this, in tempo, no frills, for seven minutes straight, and his musicians play and improvise over such a simple harmonic background.

I guess this is the kind of thing people refer to when they blame musical complexity for poor audiences in current jazz. I don't think generalizations work, but, I must say, in this case I'd see their point. Here, the music as set up by the leader, Silver, is first and last.